I Côa, I Saw, I Conquered

 Another game has been and gone and would be lost to posterity unless I wrote about it. James called it Coa Constrictor, but I wasn't paying attention so I can't tell you with any confidence why. Presumably it's to do with the river and with the British deployment area being a bit, well, constricted. The table looked nothing much like this:

As you will have gathered from the heading, I won this time, when I just managed to achieve my secret victory condition before the wheels fell off. I had had a guess - a wrong guess - at Peter's victory condition and was doing a lot of unnecessary defending. I would never have worked the correct objective out in a month of Sundays because, when revealed, it turned out to be ambitious to the point of impossibility; sensibly enough he was instead trying to win by biffing my forces until they gave up, which they very nearly did.

Even by our standards there was a huge rule change in the middle. Had we played the first night with the rules of the second the French would have won. Had we played the second night with the rules of the first the British would have won by a country mile. I'm not entirely sure we've got it right yet. Anyway, slight gear change and next week will see some siege action in the annexe. 

I came, I sawmill, I didn't conquer

 Hot weather normally sees your bloggist too busy frolicking in the sunshine to post here, but in common with many others I am finding the current spell all a bit much, and have retreated indoors. That gives me a chance to say a few words about the conclusion of the game I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago. I didn't take any photos; James didn't take any photos; in fact no one took any photos, so I have stolen the one below from his original post about the scenario.

The only action worth speaking of took place on the hill in the bottom right corner. As I had won all the initiative I was able to occupy it with three units of infantry in line and a gun. The French approached from the general area of the bridge with four units in column of attack, one behind the other. Everything was set up for me to deal with them in piecemeal fashion. I fired the gun: nothing. I fired all the infantry: nothing. I fired all the infantry again: nothing. I fired all the infantry again: well you get the picture. The French kept coming, marched straight through the British line and the game was over.

One can't draw any conclusions about the rules from all this; it was simply a sequence of appalling dice rolls. The consensus was that it must have rained and made the powder wet. Although the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain, on this occasion we can assume it fell on the hill instead. So, we shall have another go this week and try to put into action any conclusions we have drawn from our couple of (or in my case one and a half) games. Back in late 2019 when we first started using Piquet family rules for the Peninsular I wrote that they seemed rather unfair on the French, who always got blown away before making contact with British infantry in line formation. I'd say that the current version leans slightly towards the French. If I understand it all correctly - by no means a given - a French column of attack down to one quarter strength counts the same in melee as a British line with no losses; indeed if it initiates the melee by charging then it has the advantage. 

The other question you are no doubt asking yourself is why the battle was over after just one small element of it was resolved? This has to do with James' period specific adjustment to the morale rules. I've never been a fan of the Piquet morale rules, partly because they are not thematic (they are a mishmash of various unrelated things lumped together in a mechanism to determine both when the game ends and who wins), and partly because I could never see why the process for assigning amounts of morale would necessarily deliver the 'correct' result to make the game work well. James' tweak is certainly thematic (although still perched on top of what I regard as a rackety base), but simply means that the question of 'correct' morale levels now applies four or five times as often as it did before.

Heat

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,

rend it to tatters. 

Fruit cannot drop

through this thick air - 

fruit cannot fall into heat

that presses up and blunts 

the points of pears 

and rounds the grapes. 

Cut the heat - plough through it, 

turning it on either side 

of your path.

   - Hilda Doolittle

The Herald In Late Medieval Europe

 I mentioned recently the idea of blogging niches. I seem to be slipping into one by default, namely reviewing obscure books about the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which no one else either has any interest in or will ever read. This is today's:

First published in 2009, this is another which I would certainly not have bought at the initial price demanded. Its contents are nine academic papers by various authors discussing the identity and roles of officers of arms in a range of European regions. I read it under a slight misapprehension in that I thought that it would include some discussion about what heralds did whilst on the battlefield, or at least on campaign. However, apart from a few Scots heralds in the service of various Scandinavian kings who apparently joined in the fighting whenever they could, it doesn't. There is plenty of interesting stuff about tournaments and diplomacy, but I'd be hard pushed to recommend it specifically to wargamers. I was personally quite surprised by a number of things contained in the book: just how late in the middle ages it was before the whole business of heraldry was formalised, the extent and depth of diplomacy between countries which seem to me to be a long way apart (e.g. Denmark and Portugal), and the degree to which Paul Bettany's act as Geoffrey Chaucer really does reflect the role that the heralds performed at the joust.

I'm embarrassed to say that I also didn't previously know that a sister of Henry V became Queen of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Pueblo Aserradero

The lack of regular posting here has been due to lack of external stimulus to provide the inspiration. Ironically my original blogging niche was as a wargamer who didn't wargame, but that space seems to have become very crowded of late. I assumed that the restarting of gaming would in itself be sufficient to rectify things, but sod's law meant that, after waiting fifteen months, I missed the second evening. It seems that I lost in absentia, which was not surprising and was at least an efficient way to do it. However, I did turn up for week three and the start of a new game, details of the set up of which can be found here. It had been very pleasant to find that all was reassuringly familiar after the long gap - except for James' moustache obviously - and that situation carried on. In fact there was an unexpected return to something which had first been the subject of heated debate at least eight years ago: the rotation of the earth on its axis, the orbiting of the earth around the sun, and their combined effect on the length of the day at different longitudes and in different seasons. Thankfully, where once there had been discord, there is now harmony. The solar system, being unaware of, and uninterested in, the debate seems to have carried on regardless in the meantime. La causerie scientifique then moved on to quantum mechanics and once again there was unanimity; we all agreed that it was very, very complicated (*) and also that gluon was an amusing name for a particle. 

But, what of the game I hear you ask. Well, I'm the British, I got all the initiative, I currently have possession of the target village, and the Connaught Rangers were an Irish regiment. I am sure that James will fill in the gaps in that summary on his blog in due course.

* As an illustration of this, last week's New Scientist says that we now know that at high enough energy levels a Higgs boson decays into itself. Come again?